Retailers, wholesalers, and other product distributors typically maintain an inventory of various items that may be ordered, leased, borrowed, rented, viewed, and so forth, by clients or customers. For example, an e-commerce website may maintain inventory in a fulfillment center. When a customer orders an item, the item is picked from inventory, routed to a packing station, packed, and shipped to the customer. In some cases, an associate may manually place an item(s) in a staging area as part of a production distribution workflow. For example, the staging area can include shelves designated for holding pre-assembled customer orders before the orders are delivered to the customer.
Conventional systems that use staging areas typically require associates to manually enter information for each item they are interacting with (e.g., by scanning a barcode on the item). In some cases, associates may be required to enter multiple pieces of information (e.g., multiple barcodes) for a single item. Moreover, once an associate places the item in its destination location, conventional systems may again require the associate to enter information associated with the destination location (e.g., by scanning a barcode associated with a particular location in the staging area). Each of these manual transactions can impact efficiency (e.g., the number of items processed within a given period of time) and increases the likelihood that a problem will occur (e.g., the barcode for the wrong staging area being scanned).